Idiots in science: When Nature Looks Unnatural

Subject: Idiots in science: When Nature Looks Unnatural Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:00 pm

...Fortunately — maybe — there is a complication. Soon after Guth proposed inflation, the physicists Alexander Vilenkin and Andrei Linde pointed out that the process of inflation can go on forever. Instead of the inflaton energy converting into ordinary particles all throughout the universe, it can convert in some places but not others, creating localized “Big Bangs.” Elsewhere inflation continues, eventually producing other separate “universes,” eventually an infinite number. From an attempt to explain conditions in the single universe that we see, cosmologists end up predicting a “multiverse.”

This may sound like a very peculiar result. But in the news conference after last week’s announcement, both Guth and Linde suggested that evidence for inflation boosts the case for the multiverse. And perhaps the multiverse repays the favor. The fundamental laws of physics obey the principles of quantum mechanics: Rather than predicting definite outcomes, we attach probabilities to members of an ensemble of many different experimental outcomes. If inflation begins in any part of this quantum ensemble, and that inflation goes on forever, it creates an infinite number of individual universes. So even if inflation itself seems unlikely, multiplying by the infinite number of universes it creates makes it quite plausible that we find ourselves in a post-inflationary situation.

More crap here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/when-nature-looks-unnatural/?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=MostEmailed&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Idiots in science: When Nature Looks Unnatural

Idiots in science: When Nature Looks Unnatural

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